


track 8

by Feste



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Dreamscapes, Family Secrets, First Meetings, Gen, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 13:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8373172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feste/pseuds/Feste
Summary: Magnus is catching up on some rest when a stranger comes calling.
[Spoilers for plot points revealed in Episode 50 / Lunar Interlude IV and discussed in Episode 51 / The Suffering Game Chapter One.]





	

**Author's Note:**

> been listening to a lot of [emotion side b](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jztyqh58JEw) lately

Birds.

That’s the first thing Magnus hears when he wakes up, a morning like any other, tucked into his bed and feeling around on the empty other half of the bed for his wife, who’s been a much earlier riser than him since the day they met. But even straining his ears to make out a single trace of the racket Julia always, always makes while she’s putting a pot of tea on gives him nothing — there’s not even the slightest bit of chatter from Steven, who wakes before either of them and goes to bed long after they’ve retired, every single day, without fail.

“Jules?”

No reply.

“Steven?”

The birds grow deafeningly louder outside his window, an orchestra that makes him double over and clutch his head. It’s so impossibly loud that he feels like he’s going to black out, their chirps turning into endless, howling human screams, ripping into his brain and leaving behind shreds that feel like static, his vision is going blurry with the overwhelming feeling of sheer wrongness, why is it always static —

A knock on the door silences everything. Startled and still breathless in the quiet, Magnus looks around. He’s alone in his house. There’s no screaming people, no chattering wildlife, no familiar family noises of everyone going about their day.

There’s just another knock at the door. When he opens it, half expecting to see either Steven or Jules, he sees… Nobody. There’s nobody in front of him at his line of sight.

“I’m down here.” A young dwarf girl is looking up at him when Magnus glances down, wide brown eyes familiar for a reason he can’t place and doesn’t think he should be able to, her hair bound up into a puff atop her head that bobs as she rocks back and forth aimlessly. She might be thirteen, or maybe twelve; Magnus isn’t very good at ages, and anyway, he must be pretty bad with faces too, because hers starts looking a little indistinct when he tries to pin down any other features beyond that.

“Hello, Magnus Burnsides,” she says. “It’s very nice to meet you. May I come in?”

“What’s your name?” Magnus asks, because something is telling him that he both should and shouldn’t know, but he can’t figure out what parts of his brain are pushing that impulse. The girl chews on the inside of her cheek and lets out a hum that comes out overlapping with a man’s faint voice, so barely audible that his words have faded into a hum matching hers, and when Magnus looks around, there’s nobody there for miles.

“I haven’t decided if I’m going to tell you that yet,” his visitor answers.

“My wife isn’t here,” Magnus tells her. He doesn’t know why. Maybe she’ll know where Jules has gone, maybe the two of them passed each other by on that impossibly long road stretching behind her, and did he always live in a dense forest filled with trees he’s never seen before in his life?

“No,” the girl agrees. “She isn’t here anymore.”

The walls around him burst aflame, glitteringly terrible in the way they pull all the air out of his lungs to fuel themselves, and Magnus rushes to shelter the strangely calm girl from any falling debris that he knows will be coming down off the ceiling — but she exhales and all the flames go out, leaving the house exactly as it had been when he’d first stumbled to the door.

“This place isn’t on fire anymore,” she says. “It couldn’t burn forever.”

That makes sense, he supposes, but it doesn’t feel like it should.

“May I come in?” Magnus’s impatient visitor asks again, rocking back on the heels of her feet. He steps aside and watches as she beelines for the kitchen like knowing where it was would only be natural. Bypassing all the unfinished projects scattered around in an open front room that seemed so much bigger than it had when he’d crossed it a minute earlier, Magnus follows her in. She’s already made tea and comfortably sat herself down in his favorite chair by the time he passes the threshold, but Magnus is nothing if not a charitable man who considers himself to be great with kids, so he takes the wobbly one he's been swearing to Jules for weeks that he’ll get around to repairing soon.

“There’s a conversation I think you and I should have,” his guest says, dipping a biscuit into her cup of tea and sliding them across to Magnus. They’re his favorite brand.

He really can’t refuse strawberry biscuits, so he takes one and chomps down on it so enthusiastically that crumbs go flying. “So what’d — sorry, didn’t mean for that bit to get in your drink, my bad — what’d you want to talk about?”

A little nonplussed but obviously not as bothered by the mess as some old friend Magnus can’t quite remember the name of at the moment, his guest sighs, then takes one last sip before pushing her teacup to the side. Pleased, Magnus takes a moment to admire her fortitude.

“I want to talk to you about Merle Highchurch.”

More crumbs fall out of his mouth, but Magnus barely registers these.

“Hopefully you understand what I’m asking,” he hears, but suddenly it isn’t the girl sitting across from him at a kitchen table that should have been disintegrated to smoke years ago — it’s Merle, with the same lively eyes and twist to his mouth as he frowns that Magnus knows so well.

“My wife, Hekuba,” Merle says. His eyes are closed and his brow is creased. Magnus realizes he never would have heard these words or even known Merle existed, let alone known him so well, when this kitchen was still standing. “I left my wife, Hekuba.”

Then Taako is scowling at him from the next chair over, face uncharacteristically guarded, earrings jingling with the force of his anger. “What I do on my time off is none of your fuckin’ — fuckin’ beeswax, you ass, stop Pinocchio’ing around in my personal life!”

When Magnus blinks, equally taken aback by both that vulnerability and that distrust as he had been the times he’d heard them in real life, both of his best friends disappear in a puff of smoke that fills his lungs with terror. They’ve vanished, both of them, and if he isn’t there with them, something terrible might — something terrible will — The girl is back in Merle’s empty chair, her thin fingers resting atop Magnus’s scarred and shaking hands.

“Breathe,” she says. “My name is Mavis.”

“Merle’s daughter. Wait, that’s…"

His heart is in his throat, but he forges on, because he thinks the words will burst out of his chest like the monster from _Fantasy Aliens_ if he doesn't.

"Merle has a daughter? You're Merle's daughter?”

Mavis bites her lip. Asking that question like it’d never been an option he’d considered before has obviously upset her, so Magnus wants to take all of his confusion and unawareness and mistakes back, but the smoke filling up his lungs chokes off his words every time he tries to open his mouth.

“My dad has two kids.”

For all of the other things in the room Magnus knows he should be looking around at, every detail of the room he wants to absorb to help preserve his slowly-decaying memory of life before the attack he hadn’t even been there for, he can’t take his eyes off the stone of far speech Mavis keeps turning over in her hands.

“When he left, he left me and my step-brother Mooky,” she continues. “Mooky is a few years younger than me. He didn’t really — for a while, Dad didn’t talk to us at all. Sometimes he would send things, but he missed a lot of birthdays. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to know what kind of person he is.”

Fire has started creeping up around the baseboards of his house’s walls, but looking at it now is inspiring none of that earlier panic in Magnus. Instead, he feels a deep and gut-wrenching sadness in knowing he couldn’t possibly stop this destruction if he tried. All the strength in the world couldn’t keep this life from disintegrating, not when it was already a long gone memory, not when Magnus had only ever been human.

One of Mavis’s small hands is clutching his own again.

“Merle’s — he’s a good friend,” Magnus says.

Almost as if the words can’t keep themselves contained any more than his earlier question, Mavis fires back. “But not a very good father.”

A thousand things come flooding to mind all at once, small moments with Merle, as the flames climb to scratch at the edge of the lowest family photos hanging all around him. Magnus remembers sloppily-applied bandages, enthusiastic but poorly thought-out life advice, quiet moments together in taverns or by the fire or sharing jokes over training. When he’d sat with Merle and talked about all the ways he’d first fallen in love with Julia, Merle had let him talk, asking questions at what might not have been the right moments, but had been just the times Magnus would have drowned in his own grief if he hadn’t remembered someone else was sitting right beside him.

Merle is like a father to him, and to Taako, too. A really damn good one, at that. The three of them had formed their own little unit, all their easy camaraderie having long since solidified into something Magnus hadn’t realized was his family until he’d remembered what it felt like to lose one.

And Merle left behind an entirely different family to be a part of theirs.

From across the table, Mavis is trying to blink back tears. Magnus knows that she knows all those things about Merle, now, because she’s here with them and they’re filling the space around him, all the stifling smoke in the air filtering itself out and a clean ocean breeze taking its place.

“I’m not angry at anybody, Mr. Burnsides,” she says, carefully retracting her hand to wipe the teardrops away and clutch the stone of far speech in both palms again. “I don’t want anything from you, or from Dad. I came here because I wanted to know what kind of person he is. Not the one my mom complains about constantly, or the one who tries really hard to be nice when he sees us, but the way he treats people he didn’t ever have to be with in the first place. Who he is when he’s really happy.”

She bites the inside of her cheek again, the same way Merle always has when he doesn’t know what to do, and her face pieces itself together in his mind. Gods, Magnus puts together every way she is so much like Merle, down to the quiet resignation in her broad face as she calms down, the chipped but still vibrant shells hanging around her neck, her careful acceptance of getting anything she possibly could out of this one conversation.

A thought springs to life in Magnus’s mind as pictures of Julia vanish among the embers all around him, so this time, he reaches across the table and grabs her clutched hands in his.

“You can be angry about him leaving,” Magnus says, feeling the smoke that had been hiding at the very lowest point in his lungs spill out with every word. “Even if it wasn’t his fault, even if he would have been miserable staying, even if he’s my best friend and all the people in his new life love him, Mavis, you can still be angry. Not like your mom is, maybe, but in your own way. You don’t have to learn a thousand good things about him from someone else to make yourself forgive him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Mavis stares at him. For a few long, breathless seconds, she looks at him, her mouth pulled taut and hands gripping impossibly tight onto the stone between them.

“Even if you love him,” Magnus says. “Even if you love him, that doesn’t mean you have to settle for — for never thinking less of him for it. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or that you’re your mom. He swears all the time, Mavis. Like, so much! And sometimes, in the morning, when he first wakes up, his breath smells like barf for no reason but he won’t believe us when we tell him. And he isn’t nice, not all the time, definitely not to everyone.”

The ceiling timbers above them are dancing with the final stages of what Magnus knows is his home disappearing into an unsalvageable ash. Across from him, Mavis’s face keeps contorting to try out different expressions in a perpetual tie between laughing and crying, but Magnus’s heart is overflowing with so many years of sadness and happiness and everything between that he thinks his can’t look much different.

“If you want to tell him something, while you still can, you should.”

“He was never actually my dad.” she tells Magnus, her features shifting, glaringly noting all the ways she looked so very different, from her more expressive eyebrows to her thinner nose to her eyes being substantially darker than his in the light coming from everywhere around them. All the ways she looked nothing like Merle. “Not like he’s Mooky’s.”

Easy laughter from the rest at the end of a long-finished quest fills Magnus's ears. 

“He’s your dad as long as you think of him that way, Mavis. I know Merle, and I'd bet that he thinks he is, too.” Even if he doesn't always feel like he's such a good one, even if he might not know what to do to be a good one to his first kids, Magnus doesn't say, but he feels it get across in their connected hands.

Mavis’s eyes widen again before she buckles, head bowing so low that he can’t see her face, her shoulders shaking with the quiet sobs of someone who’d spent so long thinking she was going about something all wrong and could barely believe that she might be doing okay after all. He lets her cry. There didn't seem to be anyone else who would, and besides, in a sorta-convoluted way, she was his family, too.

It isn’t until he hears an entirely unfamiliar kid screaming just outside that Magnus realizes the walls of his house are completely gone. They’ve faded away, leaving only charred foundations in their place, the house so completely ruined that even the table he and Mavis are sitting at is a burned hunk of wood with two stumps on either side. His heart is calm, even if it hurts to know that he’s lost so much here, because life has kept going and this empty ruin isn’t all he’s been left with.

In the big, wide world outside, the forest has vanished, too. Merle is standing in an empty plains with Angus, a different Mavis, and an even tinier boy that Magnus guesses must be Mooky. A tiny gift is being passed between Mavis and her father — it’s hidden between their distant forms the same way it’s hiding in Mavis’s small hands now, but Magnus knows, somehow impossibly but surely, that it’s the same stone of far speech his thoughts keep returning to. And he knows that it isn’t his mind making him be quite so stuck on it, either; it’s Mavis’s. She might have visited him in what was absolutely some kind of weird, hyper-real dream created by Magnus, but they were meeting in the middle on all of it.

“I hope I can meet you for real soon, Mr. Burnsides.” Mavis says. The smile in her voice might be stuffed up with the left over flood of her tears, but it's still a smile, so bright that he wants to turn back and see what that honest and true expression of happiness on her face looked like.

He turns back and she’s gone, gone the same way all his dream’s visitors have been, but he there’s no panic in realizing his hands are empty.

Just relief.

Magnus Burnsides wakes up in his Bureau of Balance room, on the bed that’s much smaller than the one he shared with Julia, in a dormitory that will never be the same as his wife’s family home, living a life that doesn’t include any of the people he once thought he would grow old with. Someone who sounds suspiciously like Taako yells an excessively foul swear (even for Taako, or anyone with ears, frankly) in the hallway as Merle’s familiar triple-drumming power knock hammers into Magnus’s front door loud enough to wake the dead.

Magnus closes his eyes, takes a breath, then wipes the tears off his face and climbs out of bed to go greet his weird, fumbling new family for another day.

**Author's Note:**

> while i was writing this i thought “huh… sure are a lot of m names in taz…” for the first time. hmmmmmmmmmm.


End file.
